


swing on a star

by Polexia_Aphrodite



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: 1940s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1940s, Darcy helps, F/M, Golden Age Hollywood, Historical Accuracy, Steve's still figuring stuff out, Subtext, name dropping, sexual ice-breaking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polexia_Aphrodite/pseuds/Polexia_Aphrodite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1943, Steve Rogers arrives in Hollywood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	swing on a star

** 

**1943**  
 **Studio City, California**

Los Angeles feels like worlds away from anything Steve Rogers is used to – across the continent from Brooklyn’s cozy boroughs and familiar landmarks. Everything in California is new – sprung up out of the ground just a few decades ago, the product of the sweat and toil of miners and farmers and movie producers. Bright yellow sun beats down hot and dry on red tiled roofs, orange groves, and shimmering cerulean swimming pools. It’s hard to get used to – this city full of beautiful people, some on the rise and some nursing tarnished hopes. Senator Brandt’s aide offers little advice, just hands Steve a pair of dark sunglasses and drives him to the Republic Pictures lot.

Steve knows he’s not in for anything prestigious – Republic makes B-movies, low-rent westerns and the kinds of corny serials that _Captain America_ is supposedly perfect for. He gets a tour of the studio, shakes some hands, and gets set up with a handful of scripts and a fresh costume. The thing is, Steve Rogers has always loved pictures – loved to lose himself in darkened theaters full of flickering light – and he’s seen enough to know that the words he’s been given are shit: boring, clichéd, one-note drivel, stuff that makes him look like a lunkhead and a brute.

He hates it – hates that somewhere along the way he signed away everything that Abraham Erskine had wanted for him. When Steve finally decides he can’t stomach it, that he has to _do_ something about it, he starts by walking himself through the lot, past rows of giant soundstages and manufactured streets from the Old West, searching for clues to guide him to the perpetrator of his most current nightmare – the owner of the name printed on the front page of each of the _Captain America_ scripts with a credit as “writer”: D.E. Lewis

It’s an hour before he finds it: a squat bungalow with a painted sign hung next to the door that reads “SCRIPTS.” Steve doesn’t know what to expect, not really, but he’s sure that Lewis must be the kind of thoughtless meathead who would write the worthless pages he’s been given. But when he passes over the threshold, asking for D.E. Lewis gets him pointed towards a bombshell brunette with black-rimmed glasses and glossy red-painted fingernails, typing intently on a Remington Portable.

“Ma’am,” he starts, adjusting his jacket and holding out his hand to her, “I’m Steve Rogers. I’m…I play Captain America.”

She stands, smoothing her skirt and taking his hand. “Well, whaddya know.”

She introduces herself as Darcy, gives his hand a brisk shake, and sits back down, taking her glasses off and letting them hang around her neck by a long cord. She’s nothing like the girls in New York – her hair isn’t as neatly styled, and there’s something crass about the way she eyes him and leans back in her seat, but the sight of her setting a long cigarette between parted, rouged lips, lighting the end with a spark from a silver lighter, is hypnotic and dazzling.

“It’s the script,” Steve lowers himself slowly into the seat opposite her desk. “I just don’t think it’s very realistic.”

She raises her eyebrows and crosses her arms, her cigarette dangling from one hand.

“Which part?”

He hesitates, quailing under the directness of her gaze. It’s apparent that she’s used to tussling in a higher weight class. Steve pulls in a deep breath and presses on.

“It’s just—Some of the dialogue, I don’t think I – _he_ – ought to…ought to be such a bully. That’s all.” Steve holds himself perfectly still, waiting for her response.

Darcy takes a long drag from her cigarette, the tip of it crackles and glows orange. Her eyes narrow as she blows a cloud of white smoke into the room. The purse of her lips, full and red, makes his chest tighten.

“Listen, fella, I don’t know what kind of studio you think this is, but in these parts, the writers write,” she taps her nameplate, which reads in embossed brass _D.E. LEWIS, WRITER_ , “and the talents talent. For chrissakes, we’re making a serial, not _Gone with the Wind_.”

“C’mon, Darce,” calls out the man from the desk adjacent to hers, a lanky, sandy-haired writer (it’s obvious enough) with a lilting English accent, “You’re not the one who has to read this horseshit on camera.”

She seems to ponder it for a moment, then rolls her eyes. Her hands press against the top of her desk and her chair slides back.

“Alright then, come on,” she stands, pulls on a pair of kid gloves. She slides her typewriter into its case, picks it up in one hand and hooks a purse into the crook of her elbow. “I bet you’ve got a nice advance burning a hole in your pocket. Take me to dinner and you can tell me all about it.”

Her deskmate balks, “Only because you haven’t got the bread to buy a bowl of soup.”

Darcy shoots him a murderous look, then turns to Steve with a smile, steps around the desk and wraps her hand around his bicep.

“Never mind him,” she stage-whispers. “He’s just jealous he’s stuck here with _King of the Mounties_ when I’ve got a handsome specimen like you to buy me a drink.”

As she leads him out of the bungalow and into the fading sunlight, Steve feels himself flush from his hairline to his toes.

 

**

 

Darcy directs Steve’s driver to the Formosa, and he finds himself tucked in a curved booth with red plastic-covered seats. Darcy scoots in close enough that he can smell her perfume – musky and heady. She’s not a damn thing like Peggy, who has ruled his thoughts since before he started this USO circus, but he recognizes her as a distant cousin of the girls he’s met in the show – she sells herself in the same brash, decisive, sure way. He wonders how long he’ll have to spend in show business before he’s the same.

“Clark Gable eats here, you know,” she tells him, “Or, well, he did before he enlisted.”

Steve just nods and swallows, hoping that they’ll get back to the scripts before he manages to make a fool of himself in front of her. His indifference makes her click her tongue in disappointment.

“Oh, come on, that hogwash always gets to greenhorns like you.”

Steve straightens and frowns. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

She smiles at him, amused by his defensiveness. He knows he ought to be even more incensed by her condescension, but she’s shockingly pretty when she smiles, and there’s something kind tucked behind the hardness in her eyes. “All right, then,” she says, and the glimmer of approval feels like a small victory.

Over the next hour and a half, Darcy swallows down two martinis and tucks into her steak and potato enthusiastically. Steve struggles to keep up; the voracious appetite he’s had since the serum transformed him finds its match in the distracting brush of Darcy’s ankles against his legs each time she crosses and uncrosses her legs under the table.

“Are you tryin’ to make it here, or what?” she asks with her mouth full, shaking her fork at him, “I may work on Poverty Row, but I know a _face_ when I see one. You could make a million with a kisser like that.”

Steve cringes against the rush of blood to his cheeks.

“I just want to help people, ma’am. That’s all. All this,” he waves his hand, “wasn’t exactly my idea.”

She gives him a long look, “Jesus, it’s worse than I thought. You really _are_ him, aren’t you?”

“Who?”

“ _Who_?” she rolls her eyes, “Captain America, that’s who. What’s your contract look like?”

Steve shrugs, “Fifteen episodes for Republic.”

Darcy nods thoughtfully. “Let’s make ‘em good, then.”

When she asks, Steve tells her that Senator Brandt set him up at the Ambassador Hotel, and she gives him a low whistle and an insinuating look that makes his cheeks burn for the second time.

She makes him take them back to Wilshire Boulevard, and walks them through the Ambassador’s hallways and right into the Cocoanut Grove – the nightclub Steve has been avoiding noticing since his arrival two days ago. Before he leaves, he’s scheduled for two performances there. He’s sure to raise a mint in bonds, but he’s come to dread the show, with its hokey jokes and stage fights. It wears him down.

“Miss Lewis,” Steve tugs at her elbow, casting a quick glance inside, at a patron who looks suspiciously like Cary Grant, “I think we’re a little underdressed.”

Darcy scoffs. “Like hell. And don’t you dare call me _Miss Lewis_.” She pulls out of his grip and grabs his arm instead. “This is Hollywood,” she whispers up to him. “Just act like you belong and you will. Besides, I saw your poster in the lobby. This place owes you one.”

Steve rolls his eyes and purses his lips, “People don’t usually recognize me without the mask.”

“Then I’ll make sure they know who you are,” she hisses, her gloved fingers pressing into his arm.

Darcy tosses her hair over her shoulders, straightens her spine, and tells the maître d’ that Steve’s signed a six picture deal with Paramount, instead of the paltry contract he cut with Republic. They end up at their second table of the night – round and covered by white linen.

She pulls aside a waiter and asks for a stack of cocktail napkins, pulls a fountain pen out of her purse, and writes down everything he tells her about the tour, what audiences seem to like from him and what leaves them cold, about hours of rehearsal and the fans who have started to wait outside his dressing room. There’s still a part of him that reels whenever a woman gives him her undivided attention, but while most of the time he chalks it up to the serum, Darcy seems more interested in his story than his broad shoulders. He feels a twinge of regret for thinking she wasn’t like Peggy.

“Christ,” she says when she’s covered a dozen napkins with ink, “I’ve gotta type this up. Where’s your room?”

She reaches for her typewriter case and jumps to her feet before Steve can come up with a reason why he shouldn’t lead her upstairs. On the way out she tells him in an excited whisper that she’s spotted Lana Turner, but when Steve cranes his neck, she grabs his arm and laughs.

“You can’t just _look_ like that,” she grins. Her head tips onto his shoulder, and even though she’s laughing at him, Steve feels like he’s caught the brass ring.

 

**

 

He’s spent the last few months’ worth of nights alone in hotel rooms. He’s almost gotten used to it. But having her here feels like a relief. Darcy fills the tidy, sterile space with incessant chatter as she circles the room, running her hands along the furniture, the drapes, she even touches the carpet. Steve has to admit that it’s one of the swankier hotels he’s been in, and her incorrigible enthusiasm is hard to find fault with. 

She sets up on the room’s vanity, fingers skittering across the typewriter’s metal keys. As she types, she asks him to tell her more, to tell her about his life in Brooklyn, about everything that makes him tick. He tells her what he can about Bucky, and Coney Island, about Peggy and Dr. Erskine and Senator Brandt.

Steve sits on the bed as he talks, but even though her back’s to him, he can see her face in the vanity’s mirror. He can see her smiles, see her the way her brow creases when he gets to the harder parts – letting go of Bucky, letting go of Brooklyn. She’s beautiful when she thinks he isn’t looking at her.

The story she writes is wild and fantastic – about a Mayan curse, a poison orchid and a gang of thugs. She gives the Captain a good heart and a pretty Assistant District Attorney to fall in love with. She hands him the pages as soon as she pulls them off the typewriter; Steve stacks them carefully on the nightstand as soon as he’s read them.

It’s past midnight by the time she finishes, cracking her knuckles and twisting her waist until her spine pops. She moves to stretch out on his bed and closes her eyes. It doesn’t seem exactly right – a moment ago they had been alone in his hotel room as something like colleagues, the comforting familiarity had been cut with a certain degree of professionalism. But the weight of her on the bed next to him, the dark curve of her eyelashes against her cheeks, the rise and fall of her chest, sends a dangerous pang of desire through him.

Steve decides to leave her alone, to go for a walk to the hotel pool, or to stroll up and down Wilshire, but just as he moves to stand, her hand reaches out and closes around his wrist.

“Hey,” she says, and when he looks over at her, her eyes are open and trained on him, “Stay a while. It’s less lonely that way, don’t you think?”

Her voice cracks on her last word, and Steve thinks he can see the barest hint of nerves in the way her gaze sweeps across his face. He toes off his shoes, leans back down on the bed, and Darcy’s eyes slip shut again. She folds her hands on her stomach and turns her face away from him.

As she sleeps, Steve thinks about the bits of her life she told him about between drinks and cocktail napkins – how she grew up half-a-mile away from the MGM lot, about her father the set dresser and her stunt double mother, how showbusiness runs in her blood, and she couldn’t have done anything else if she’d wanted to (and she hadn’t).

He wonders if this could be his life now – movie deals and stage shows. It’s not anything he ever expected for himself, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, not with steady money and a brassy dame like Darcy by his side. Bucky might even like it out here, once he’s free of the war – Steve’s sure the hot sun and swimsuit-clad starlets would hold some kind of appeal. He’s pondering the boxy white stucco houses he’s seen, and what it would be like to live so close to the beach, when she wakes up.

She runs a hand across her hair. Her curls are sagging, but there’s something intimate about seeing her like this – groggy and waking up. Darcy runs her fingers under her eyes, wiping away twin smears of mascara, and stands, walking to the room’s wide window and pushing aside the drapes.

Even from this height, the glow from the pool lights her up in blue. Steve leans up on his elbows to watch her. She turns.

“Did you bring a bathing suit?”

Steve scrubs a hand along the back of his neck and shakes his head. “I’ve never even owned one.”

“s’alright,” she shrugs and lifts an eyebrow, “I haven't got one either.”

She gathers her things and tells him to put on his shoes.

 

**

 

When they reach the pool, dawn is still at least an hour away; Steve can barely see a blue-gold glow above the black outline of the buildings downtown. Darcy picks up a stack of white towels from an unattended pool house and strolls along the water’s edge. The pool’s lit from inside, the movement of the water casting rippling shadows across her face.

“I’m not sure we’re supposed to be here,” Steve murmurs.

“Would you rather I left?” Darcy _grins_ at him, audacious and daring, and Steve can’t help but smile back.

“Not exactly.”

She sets down her purse and the typewriter case, sits on the end of a lounge chair, unbuckles the ankle straps on her shoes and lifts her feet out of them. Before Steve can process it, she stands again, unbuttoning her blouse and unzipping her skirt. In another moment, she’s standing in front of him in a bra and girdle, covered by a satin slip. She stoops to unhook her stockings, rolls them off her legs and adds them to the pile of her clothes. A handful of hairpins from her purse hold her hair up in a messy twist.

Darcy walks to the nearest railing and steps into the pool. Her feet kick and she’s propelled backwards.

“Don’t be shy,” she smirks. She’s weightless in the water, leaning backwards with her arms floating by her sides, the crests of her breasts, covered in stiff white lace and creamy satin, just breaking above the waterline. Steve can feel how slackjawed and idiotic he looks. It’s easy to imagine the disdainful look Bucky’d give him if he could see him now - hemming and hawing while a beautiful girl undresses and invites him for a swim in the starlight.

Steve huffs and scans the dark windows of the hotel above them and the silent grounds around them, reassuring himself that they’re alone before he starts in on the line of buttons at the front of his shirt. He shucks his shoes, shirt, undershirt and slacks, and folds them neatly beside Darcy’s sloppy pile.

Behind him, he can hear Darcy splashing; when he gets his shirt off, her soft wolf whistle makes his head turn. Her arms are folded on the edge, her chin rests on the back of her hands. Steve feels his face burn; there’s something specific about the way Darcy looks at him that makes him feel _seen_ in a way he can’t describe. He knows his white cotton shorts will be unforgiving once they’re wet, but he sighs and lowers himself into the pool anyway. The water’s lukewarm, nearly the same temperature as the warm, dry air above them.

He’s only just stepped off the ladder’s last rung when Darcy grabs him by the forearm and pulls him up to her. Her hands skim across his bare shoulders, her fingers leaving hot trails as he slides through the water towards her. Steve feels his hands rise to rest on the sides of her waist; under the water, her satin slip feels like nothing at all, and the hot, solid curve of her body under it makes his brain stutter and fall short.

He can tell that she senses his nervousness – and how could she not, when it’s oozing out of him through every pore? – and she gives him her gentlest smile.

“Would you look at that moon?” she whispers. Steve frowns; all he remembers was a flat, dark, moonless sky, but just as he casts his eyes up to check, Darcy’s lips press against the corner of his mouth. Steve starts and pulls back, just for a moment, just long enough to reassure himself that it actually happened. He doesn’t know what his next move is, though, and he sighs in relief when Darcy kisses him again, this time square and full on the mouth.

His lips part against hers, and her tongue slides against his. Her arms tighten around his neck, and then she’s pressed against him – chest and stomach, hips and thighs – and Steve’s sure the pressure of the water is the only thing keeping him upright. He soldiers past the heavy, hard weight between his legs to wrap his arms tighter around her waist; Darcy’s legs lift and wrap around his hips, the short slip sliding up until Steve’s pressed against her center. She shifts against him, and Steve feels his knees buckle; he walks them backwards until her back hits the edge of the pool.

Steve wishes he knew what the hell he was doing. He’s sure that there’s something he could do to make this better for her, but Darcy’s breathy moans, and the way her head drops back against the tile edge of the pool as their hips grind together suggest that something’s going all right. She kisses him again and again, until he feels breathless and a little dizzy, until he wonders if the serum really cleared up all the problems in his lungs.

It won’t get any better than this, he thinks, it _can’t_. He spares a thought for Peggy, for the right partner, but he’s sure he’ll never see her again, and there’s something too irresistible about being pressed up against a woman like this for the first time to put a stop to it. And _hell_ , he _likes_ Darcy, likes the way she manages him, her determination and grit, the way her mouth feels on his skin, and the way her hand slips into the waistband of his shorts without a care for propriety.

Steve’s touched himself enough times to know that she’s not trying to tease him. Her fingers stroke him relentlessly, moving fast and sure, swiping her thumb across the sensitive head and twisting her wrist on the downstroke. It’s nothing he’s ever had before, but something he’s imagined a million times. He thinks of the more ungentlemanly stories Bucky’s told him, and wonders what it would be like to be inside her, surrounded by her like that. He wonders if she’d let him.

Steve slides a hand up her arm to the straps of her bra and slip and pulls, pressing a line of wet kisses along her bare, chlorine-flavored shoulder; his hand slides to her breast, letting it fill his palm, lifting and dipping his mouth to touch his lips to the soft skin just above a line of white fabric he still doesn’t dare cross.

When he comes, he isn’t ready for it, not yet. He’d be happy to go on like this forever – with Darcy’s ankles hooked at the small of his back, pressing increasingly desperate kisses into his mouth, the fingernails of her free hand scoring his scalp. But a tension pools at the base of his spine, in the pit of his belly, and then he’s falling apart with a gasp, one hand clutching Darcy’s hip and one hand gripping the pool’s tile edge.

“You’re somethin’ else,” she breathes against his cheek as he comes down from it, forcing himself to even out his breaths and calm his thudding heart.

She kisses him once more, with a hand on either side of his face, before she slips out of his arms and pulls herself up and onto the poolside. The sky’s started to lighten, the darkness of night giving way to a clear, pale blue. Darcy’s lit up in lavender as she pulls her clothes on over damp skin.

Steve hoists himself out of the pool and wraps an arm around her waist. “Come back upstairs,” he says, with his voice too breathy and desperate. He has no idea what she’s thinking, and it’s all he wants to know.

Darcy smiles and presses her palm against his bare shoulder. “Got work to do.”

She bends to pick up her shoes, letting them dangle from her fingers by their straps, and gathers her typewriter, the stack of script pages and her purse. She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, then leans back, winking over her shoulder at him as she walks away.

“See you on set.”

**Author's Note:**

> Attempts were made at historical accuracy in this story. The locations named did/do exist - the Formosa, The Ambassador Hotel, the Cocoanut Grove, which was the site of wartime fundraisers. Republic Pictures was a "Poverty Row" studio that produced a _Captain America_ serial in 1944, however, this wasn't _Steve Rogers'_ Captain America, which makes it very disorienting to watch.
> 
> Many thanks to the wonderful katertots and JadeCharmer for looking this little bit of story over. There's a graphic that goes with it on my tumblr [here](http://hardboiledmeggs.tumblr.com/post/74124967031/i-just-posted-swing-on-a-star-which-is-a-little). It's not much plot-wise, but I hope you all liked it. It was delightful to write.


End file.
